The Elderwood Nuttry — Mr David Gee

01 — The Human

Mr David Gee

He teaches loops, recursion and the occasional life lesson. Then he goes home and explains all three to the squirrels (who remain unmoved).

David Gee has spent the better part of two decades doing two things extremely well: teaching teenagers how computers think, and teaching squirrels absolutely nothing, because squirrels refuse to be taught.

By day, he's the computer science teacher every student remembers — the one who can debug your code from across the room with a single raised eyebrow, and who genuinely believes binary trees are more beautiful than the real kind. he is wrong, the real kind grow acorns

By evening, the classroom hoodie comes off and the gardening fleece goes on. David retreats to the Elderwood Nuttry, his backwoodland sanctuary, where a rotating cast of red and grey squirrels treat him as a slightly disappointing but reliably generous landlord.

His teaching philosophy and his squirrel philosophy are, by his own admission, identical: "Give them the resources, set good boundaries, and accept that they will store things in places you will never find again."

David Gee

role: cs_teacher | squirrel_admin

Subject taughtComputer Science

Favourite data structureThe nut hoard

Squirrels under care~40

Acorns budgeted/yr9,000

Patience levelO(∞)

02 — The Place

What is the Nuttry?

Part sanctuary, part allotment, part very damp wooden shed. The Elderwood Nuttry is where rescued and resident squirrels live the good life on a strict acorn-based economy.

🌰

The Hoard

A climate-controlled store of acorns, hazelnuts and walnuts, indexed and sorted — naturally — using an algorithm David wrote himself. The squirrels promptly re-sort it by chaos.

🌳

The Canopy Run

A network of rope bridges and platforms strung between the elder trees, letting residents commute treetop-to-treetop without ever touching the suspiciously fox-shaped ground.

🛖

The Drey Estate

Hand-built nest boxes with names instead of numbers. There's a waiting list. David maintains it on a spreadsheet. He has feelings about the spreadsheet.

03 — The Residents

Meet the squirrels

Every resident is a fully-fledged member of the Nuttry, with their own personality, grudges, and unauthorised acorn ventures.

🐿️

Nutkin

red · senior resident

The founding squirrel. Bossy, beautiful, and convinced the whole Nuttry runs on her say-so. (It does.) Has buried at least one of David's car keys.

status: in charge

🐿️

Segfault

grey · chaos unit

Named after what he does to David's morning. Crashes into bird feeders, falls off the canopy run weekly, somehow always lands fine. The squirrel equivalent of an unhandled exception.

status: recovering

🐿️

Hazel

red · the clever one

Solved a five-stage puzzle feeder in 11 seconds while staring directly at David the whole time. He's a little frightened of her. He'd never admit it.

status: too smart

🐿️

Doug

grey · the big one

Doug is large. Doug is calm. Doug has never once hurried for anything. Spends most of the day being a comfortable, breathing draught-excluder on the shed roof.

status: vibing

🐿️

Pixel & Byte

red · the twins

Indistinguishable, inseparable, and absolutely up to something. If an acorn goes missing, it's these two. David has stopped investigating. It's better for everyone.

status: prime suspects

🐿️

Sir Bartholomew

grey · the gentleman

Arrived one autumn, sat politely by the door, and simply never left. Dignified, slow-blinking, and the only resident David trusts to be left alone with the good walnuts.

status: tenured

04 — Field Notes

Squirrels, by the numbers

Genuinely true squirrel facts, as told by David to anyone who'll stand still long enough — usually a Year 12 group that just wanted to learn about arrays.

teeth, four of which never stop growing

74%

of buried nuts a squirrel never digs back up

180°

their ankles rotate, for headfirst descents

a leap a grey squirrel can clear between trees

that 74% of forgotten nuts? that's how forests get planted. squirrels are accidental gardeners.

05 — Where the two worlds meet

The Nuttry, in code

David couldn't help himself. Here is the entire Nuttry operating philosophy, expressed the only way he truly trusts.

nuttry.py — Mr Gee's woods

# the founding principle of the Elderwood Nuttry
class Squirrel:
    def __init__(self, name, mood="chaotic"):
        self.name  = name
        self.acorns = 0
        self.mood   = mood

    def store(self, acorn):
        self.acorns += 1
        return "buried somewhere. good luck."

    def remember_where(self):
        return None   # this always returns None


nuttry = [Squirrel(n) for n in RESIDENTS]

while autumn:
    for sq in nuttry:
        sq.store(gee.hands_out_acorn())

# Mr Gee, 6pm, every evening, forever

06 — A Day at the Nuttry

The daily routine

After the school bell, before the bedtime acorn count. A typical Elderwood evening runs like clockwork — squirrel-permitting.